Since launching The Photo Diner in 2012 – an online image management tool for the fashion industry that allows photo sharing between brands, PR agencies and the media – Nadine von Cohen and Gaby Howard are firmly enmeshed in the world of digital. The pair reveal their most used apps and devices.

What are your favourite apps?

• Chicfeed is a steady stream of fashion photos from sites including The Sartorialist, Jak & Jil and lookbook.nu
• Instagram
• Style.com
• Miss Chu for its home-delivered dumplings
• Airbnb is a great and inspirational international start-up success story. It’s changed the way we travel.

With social media and digital so prevalent now, how do you switch off?

It’s really hard. We run an online business with multiple social media channels, a blog and cater to international users who run on a variety of time zones. Down time is rare. The best downtime these days is time spent with friends and family and having a bath. We’ve also become devotees of what we like to call ballet pilates (barre pilates). Not sure if we would cut the mustard for Swan Lake though.

Gaby, you started off in PR and Nadine, digital media. Now you’re digital entrepreneurs. How did this evolve?

We’ve actually known each other since high school. We ran into each other at our mutually local cafe a few years ago and started talking about the nature of photo sharing in the fashion industry.

Gaby was working as a publicist and I was writing on various topics including fashion. Gaby mentioned her frustrations with the time-consuming process of sharing photos with the media and was thinking of adding a media centre to her website. I was equally frustrated with the process of sourcing photos for fashion stories.

We decided there must be a bigger solution – one that could make life easier and save time for the whole industry.

How do you think technology is impacting fashion and the retail industry?

What’s happening now is the start of a long and fruitful relationship between fashion and technology. We’re really excited about it all.

We’re living in an increasingly fast-paced, technology-driven world where everything can and will be shared electronically. Fashion shows are now live-streamed, consumers can buy straight from the catwalk, traditional print media outlets are melding with their online counterparts to deliver us more fashion, more faster.

That’s where The Photo Diner comes in. We believe that we have something really exciting to add. There’s a huge amount of opportunity to enhance the current systems of communication within the industry.

How do you stay organised – software, apps or what type of tablet do you use?

I guess we’re a little old-meets-new on this one. We each use a traditional diary to help wrap our heads around a pretty hectic schedule. Moleskin is a favourite. Of course, there’s a growing list of software and apps that help keep The Photo Diner ticking…

• Dropbox: Perfect for storing files and docs so they can be accessed and shared at any time across laptop/tablet/phone.
• Google Docs: A great way to collaborate across various projects with real-time updates.
• Online calendars.
• Planbox: Keeps our list of things to do very tidy and our project management neat.
• Xero: Today we can all be accountants.